God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology Through Worship (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
This volume outlines a Christian theology that takes worship as its basic framework, as the occasion of not only an approach toward God in piety but also separation from God in sin. Drawing on Luther, Calvin, and especially Karl Barth, Matthew Myer Boulton builds a Reformed liturgical theology, maintaining that the God of Jesus Christ is a “God against religion,” one who saves human beings from religion by entering it, transforming it, and ultimately ending it.
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- Outlines a Christian theology that takes worship as its basic framework
- Draws from Luther, Calvin, and especially Karl Barth
- Builds a Reformed liturgical theology, maintaining that the God of Jesus Christ is a “God against religion”
- Prelude: God Against Religion
- introduction: Rethinking Theology through Worship in the Reformed Tradition
- Karl Barth on Worship as “Fall”
- Rereading Genesis 2–4
- Karl Barth on Worship as “Reconciliation”
- Martin Luther and Christian Life
- God Against Religion
- Postlude: Reforming Worship
Part I: The Invention of God
Part II: “We Pray by His Mouth”
Worship, with all its promise and peril, takes center stage in this beautifully written little systematic theology by one of the best young theologians in America today. Worth reading for its illuminating treatment of Barth alone, this is a must-read for anyone interested in how religious life is a weave of both sin and salvation. With its erudition wrapped in an entertaining, accessible style, Boulton's book is systematic theology at its finest: fresh, provocative, and compelling.
—Kathryn Tanner, University of Chicago Divinity School
In the 1960s various theologians attempted to come to terms with Bonhoeffer's concept of ‘religionless Christianity' and concluded that ‘God' was dead. Here Matthew Myer Boulton, by a reexamination of Karl Barth's theology, shows that the concept was not new with Bonhoeffer but was known to such Reformers as Luther and Calvin. It is the rightness of righteousness rather than the religiosity of religion, the death of sin rather than the death of God, that lies at the heart of Christianity and is experienced in the reality of worship and is central to theology. A timely message in an age that tends to consign worship to the periphery of theological concerns.
—Robin A. Leaver, Westminster Choir College, Rider University
A provocative, well-written Christian Theology of worship. . . . Deserves much consideration from leaders and scholars of Christian worship.
—Religious Studies Review
- Title: God against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship
- Author: Matthew Myer Boulton
- Series: The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2008
- Logos Release Date: 2025
- Pages: 242
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Reformed Church › Liturgy; Public worship › Reformed Church
- ISBNs: 9780802829726, 0802829724
- Resource ID: LLS:GDRLGNRTTHWRSHP
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-10-02T21:45:56Z
Matthew Myer Boulton is an author, teacher, filmmaker, and proud papa of Jonah and Margaret. A graduate of Northwestern University, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago Divinity School, he has served on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School and as president of Christian Theological Seminary. His books include Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology (Eerdmans, 2011) and God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Eerdmans, 2008).